Dealing with Workplace Bullying
It starts small. A comment about your presentation that feels unnecessarily harsh. An email CC’d to management when a private word would have sufficed. You tell yourself you’re being oversensitive. Maybe you are.
Then patterns emerge. Your ideas get dismissed in meetings, only to be praised when someone else presents them later. You’re excluded from lunches, from conversations that stop when you approach. Projects get reassigned without explanation. Performance reviews turn hostile despite solid metrics.
Mark in accounting seems to have made you his personal project. Death by a thousand paper cuts. Nothing egregious enough to report—no shouting, no slurs—just a steady drip of undermining that makes Sunday evenings unbearable. You lie awake rehearsing conversations. Practicing defenses for attacks that haven’t happened yet.
Your partner notices. You’re irritable. Distracted. The person they fell in love with is slowly being replaced by someone who checks Slack at midnight and flinches at email notifications. “Just quit,” they say. As if it’s that simple. As if there aren’t bills, health insurance, a mortgage. As if walking away wouldn’t feel like losing.
You’ve tried everything. Being nicer. Being tougher. Documenting incidents. Going to HR. Nothing changes. Or worse—it backfires. Now you’re the “difficult one.” The one with a “personality conflict.” You start questioning your own perception. Maybe you really are the problem. Maybe you’ve always been the problem.
Workplace cruelty isn’t new. It just wore different uniforms. Roman senators undermined rivals through whisper campaigns. Medieval guilds ostracized craftsmen who threatened established hierarchies. Victorian factory managers wielded power through humiliation. The setting changes—the dynamic doesn’t.
Across centuries, certain minds confronted the reality that you cannot control how others treat you. Only how you respond. They didn’t have HR departments either. What they had were frameworks for survival that outlasted the empires where their tormentors worked.
You’re not the first to carry this
Voices Across Time
Four voices across time who understood that external hostility can never destroy what you refuse to surrender—your own judgment of yourself, your own sense of worth.
“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.”
Marcus Aurelius — Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher, 121-180 CE
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman Empire while constantly surrounded by sycophants, schemers, and people who wanted him dead. His private journal—never intended for publication—reveals a man who dealt daily with betrayal, incompetence, and malice in his inner circle.
His approach wasn’t passive acceptance. It was radical refusal to let others dictate who he became. When someone undermines you at work, they’re trying to make you smaller. They want you defensive, reactive, diminished. Every moment you spend plotting revenge or rehearsing arguments, they’ve won. Your mental real estate—occupied by them.
Marcus would remind you: Mark in accounting doesn’t control your thoughts. Only you do. The injury he causes exists only in your interpretation of it. His cruelty reveals his character, not yours. When you refuse to become bitter, when you continue doing excellent work despite the hostility, you prove something—to yourself, if no one else—that cannot be taken away.
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.”
Seneca — Letters from a Stoic
Lucius Annaeus Seneca served as advisor to the emperor Nero—a position roughly equivalent to being chief of staff to a paranoid, unpredictable narcissist. Seneca was eventually forced to commit suicide when he fell out of favor. He knew something about toxic work environments.
His letters obsessively return to the question of time. How we spend our limited years. Whether we’re actually living or merely existing. When you spend Sunday evenings dreading Monday, when your entire weekend is shadowed by workplace anxiety—what are you actually sacrificing?
Seneca wouldn’t tell you to simply endure. He’d ask harder questions. Is this job worth the price you’re paying? Not financially—existentially. You’re trading irreplaceable hours for money, yes, but also for psychological damage that will outlast any paycheck. What would the person you wanted to become at 18 think of how you’re living now?
“It is not things that disturb us, but our judgments about things.”
Epictetus — Enchiridion
Epictetus was born into slavery. His master was notoriously cruel—one story claims his leg was broken intentionally. Yet Epictetus became one of the most influential philosophers of the ancient world, teaching Roman senators and eventually earning his freedom.
His central teaching: distinguish between what you can control and what you cannot. You cannot control whether your colleague undermines you. You cannot control whether HR takes your complaints seriously. You cannot control whether your boss notices the sabotage. These things are outside your sphere of influence.
What you can control: your response. Your interpretation. Your choice to let this define you or not. Epictetus would say the bullying itself isn’t making you miserable—your judgment that “this shouldn’t be happening” is. Not that it’s okay. It’s not okay. But fighting reality (“this is unfair”) causes more suffering than the reality itself. Accept what is. Then decide what to do.
The Buddha’s teachings emerged from a world of rigid hierarchies, political intrigue, and interpersonal conflict. The sangha—his community of followers—dealt with jealousy, power struggles, and people who joined for less than pure motives.
His insight about anger applies directly to workplace bullying. Every minute you spend fuming about Mark, you’re burning yourself. He goes home, sleeps soundly, doesn’t think about you. Meanwhile, you’re replaying conversations, building cases in your head, letting resentment corrode your insides.
The Buddha would ask: who is suffering here? Not the person causing harm—they’re oblivious. You are. And while their behavior is their karma, your response is yours. Releasing the hot coal isn’t about forgiveness. It’s about self-preservation. About refusing to let someone who treats you badly also control your mental state when they’re not even present.
“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”
Buddha — Spiritual teacher and founder of Buddhism, 5th century BCE
Attributed teachings
What connects them
What they all understood
What connects these voices is a counterintuitive truth: the bully’s power exists only in your response to it. Marcus refuses to become like his tormentors. Seneca questions whether the battle is worth the life-cost. Epictetus separates what we can control from what we cannot. Buddha shows how clinging to grievance harms only ourselves.
None of them would say the bullying is acceptable. It isn’t. But they would warn against letting outrage become your identity. Against sacrificing years of life to a battle that may never be won. Against letting someone else’s dysfunction become the organizing principle of your existence.
Sometimes the wisest response is strategic withdrawal. Sometimes it’s documented resistance. Sometimes it’s finding a way to exist alongside the dysfunction without letting it consume you. The answer depends on your specific situation. But the framework is clear: protect your inner citadel. Nothing external can touch it without your consent.
Before you go
A Moment for You
Monday will come. The inbox will fill. Mark will continue being Mark. But something can shift. Not the external situation—maybe that never changes. But how much of yourself you surrender to it.
If you’re navigating workplace hostility and seeking perspective, InnerCalm+ offers personalized reflections drawn from these timeless voices—designed for modern struggles that aren’t as modern as they feel.
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